Speed up your CI/CD pipelines by caching build & runtime artifacts

Slow CI/CD pipelines delay code from reaching production and frustrate development teams. Beyond testing and compilation, a major bottleneck comes from repeatedly fetching dependencies from remote artifact repositories, a slowdown that also affects developers in their daily work. This presentation will show how to eliminate these delays by caching build and runtime artifacts such as Docker images, NPM packages, Go modules, and even Git clones and fetches. Since most artifact repositories deliver dependencies over HTTP, a reverse caching proxy like Varnish can dramatically accelerate artifact delivery at scale. We’ll break down the actual HTTP requests behind docker pull, git clone, go get, and npm install, and demonstrate how Varnish can be configured to cache these assets effectively, without compromising access control or security. We’ll also compare the power of an HTTP reverse caching proxy like Varnish to other optimization strategies such as disk caching & shallow fetches.